Bitcoin News Roundup for April 20, 2017steemCreated with Sketch.

A televised news report from CNBC India on 20th April reveals that the Indian government is leaning toward granting legality to bitcoin and virtual currencies in the country amid regulations with taxes to be levied on adopters.Read more: cryptocoinsnews.com

Chinese digital currency exchange OKCoin has stopped accepting US dollar deposits, a move it attributed to banking issues. OKCoin becomes the latest cryptocurrency service to report problems with USD transfers, coming just a day after Bitfinex revealed that it, too, wouldn’t be able to accept transfers, citing correspondent bank problems that initially focused on outgoing wires.Read more: coindesk.com

Following Bitfinex’s announcement to disable fiat deposits, more bitcoin exchanges are having the same issue. The other trading platforms have also disabled incoming USD wire transfers, citing bank account and “intermediary bank” problems.Read more: bitcoin.com

Bitcoin trading volumes in Saudi Arabia via peer-to-peer trading platform LocalBitcoins have never been higher. For the first time, trading volumes in the desert natoin topped USD $100k in bitcoin traded over a week through the decentralized platform.Read more: cryptocoinsnews.com

If you're wondering why litecoin is attracting new attention of late, you might not be alone. The often-overlooked alternative cryptocurrency is in the midst of a historically uncharacteristic price spike and a vicious bout of technical drama that is rivaling bitcoin's own scaling debate. In fact, litecoin's new developments are perhaps best viewed as simply the latest extension of bitcoin's two-year scaling debate, since the controversy also revolves around a proposed blockchain upgrade called Segregated Witness.Read more: coindesk.com

A dramatic overnight increase in hashrate is taking place in the Litecoin world. An insider told 8btc that the hashrate of LTC1BTC, a Litecoin pool, increased from less than 300 GH/S on April 17 to over 700 GH/S on April 18, while LTC TOP increased from 150 GH/S to 500G. With the rise of hashrate, support for Segwit dropped from 80 percent to a new low of 70 percent.Read more: 8btc.com

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) concluded the first-ever meeting of its High Level Advisory Group on FinTech today, a group that features a significant contingent of senior-level blockchain executives.Read more: coindesk.com

Following a previous announcement by F2Pool that they are now to signal for segregated witnesses (segwit), ViaBTC has publicly reiterated they do not support segwit for a number of reasons. The bitcoin mining pool says:

"SegWit, which is a soft fork solution for malleability, cannot solve the capacity problem… Even if SegWit after activation can slightly scale up block size with new transaction formats, it’s still far behind the demand for the development of Bitcoin network."